Amazing though it may seem, Gordon Strachan still has vulnerable air

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We tried to probe Gordon Strachan yesterday about the progress he feels he has made in his 2½ years at Celtic, and this is what he said: “If you’re a player it’s only when you stop playing that you look back and analyse how well you’ve done, and it’s the same for a manager. The thing about being a football manager is just staying in a job – if you’re staying in a job, you must be doing not bad.”

With these words, Strachan echoed almost exactly the sentiments expressed by Martin O’Neill when he was asked a similar question at the height of his Celtic reign four years ago. Back then, asked about his personal ambition at Celtic, O’Neill replied: “To stay in a job.”

When there was stifled giggling at this response from such an obviously successful, not to say adored, figure, O’Neill continued: “I’m serious. My ambition is not to get the sack. In this job, you can be out on your ear in no time, and that is something I want to avoid.”

The Strachan debate today needs some careful reflection, but one aspect is startlingly clear. No matter how successful a football manager is – a Strachan, an O’Neill, a Jos? Mourinho – it never ceases to amaze how often they feel vulnerable. Certainly, O’Neill and Strachan have brought success to Celtic, yet each man still seems to view the precipice as never far away.

How successful is Strachan as manager of Celtic? Well, he has won a league and cup double in each of his two completed seasons so far at Celtic Park, and if his side can grab a point against AC Milan in the San Siro tonight, he will have guided the club to their second successive last 16 in the Champions League.

That last deed is not yet done but, if it is, it would by anyone’s measure be a successful reign so far – even if Strachan himself says testily that all he wants to do is “stay in a job”.

There is always an air of vulnerability because, even at the Old Firm, success is not a guarantee. You need only to look at the fate of Alex McLeish, a man presently being fêted by one and all, to appreciate it.

McLeish’s total experience at Rangers spoke of reasonable success, but his 2005-06 campaign was woeful and led to him virtually being hounded from the club. Decisions went wrong, his team’s chemistry went askew, and the upshot was a grisly Rangers display on many Saturday afternoons on the field.

McLeish’s Ibrox fate should not, in today’s more fragrant climate around him, be in any way rewritten. He was sacked.

The ultimate proof of the sort of fear of failure that both O’Neill and Strachan have lived with in Glasgow was provided by Paul Le Guen. While the Frenchman’s case was complex, failure was the upshot, and failure with one of Glasgow’s Big Two can be a bitter, excoriating experience.

The laws of the universe surrounding Rangers and Celtic do not allow for it. A lack of success isn’t unlucky, it is a matter of public vilification and opprobrium. Proud men, who have achieved much in football, suddenly have to live with the condemnation of being “a dunce” or, in Le Guen’s case, “that French dud” as one or two of his more hands-rubbing critics came to know him by.

It is against this unforgiving backdrop that Strachan continues to succeed at Celtic. All the analysis, all the issues of luck and random good or bad fortune, pale beside the fact that he has hoisted Celtic to a nine-point mark in group D of the Champions League, with a place in the last 16 there for the taking. For all their limitations, Celtic under Strachan have still gravitated to a station where few teams in Europe would relish playing them. There is a respect about the club in the European arena today for which one man is mainly responsible.

Yet, the debate seems to never end about Strachan’s “relationship” with Celtic and the club’s followers. It is hard to quantify, an issue that doesn’t lend itself to any precision, but it does seem that a hard-core among the Celtic support remain cool about their manager. The simplest, perhaps crudest way of summing this attitude up would be to say (in reference to Strachan’s denominational background): “He isn’t one of us.”

This observation, however, has to be qualified further. The number of those Strachan dissenters among the Celtic support probably should not be exaggerated. The vast majority of fans would appear to have total respect for their manager and what he has achieved so far. The hard-core is there – the very people whose political songs Strachan openly says leave him baffled – but their size is modest. And Strachan can certainly survive and thrive at Celtic without Martin O’Neill’s Irish romanticism, just so long as he keeps delivering success.

Strachan is not an easy man to get along with. He enjoys quips, one-upmanship and put-downs. He can be nippy and sarcastic. All of that, though, is besides the point. As Gary Caldwell said yesterday, Strachan is “getting to that stage where he can cement his reputation as being among the best managers Celtic have had”.

McLeish brings smile to our faces

It was good to see the genius of Alex McLeish and Andy “Winker” Watson striking yet again at the weekend. There was heartfelt laughter – and genuine appreciation – among the press pack out here in Milan at the news of McLeish’s debut with Birmingham City ending in a last-gasp 3-2 win over Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane on Sunday.

McLeish knows full well what people say of him – that he gets lucky. There may be a grain of truth in that but, as Gary Player famously said, the more he practises, the luckier he gets. McLeish has an undoubted talent that will earn its luck every now and again.

The main point here, however, is Big Eck’s almost miraculous transformation in football over the past ten months. This time last year he was twiddling his fingers, finished with Rangers and unsure where his managerial career would take him. He was feeling unsure, frankly, because in early December 2006, his career looked moribund.

McLeish, to put it bluntly, had been bundled out of Rangers, a man held in low esteem by a contingent of Ibrox supporters. Yet 12 months on he is riding early euphoria in the Barclay’s Premier League. We’ll see where it takes him, but there is no rhyme or reason in football.